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Pear and Cardamom Caramel Cake
I love cardamom, and a couple of years ago my sister Cassie gave me a beautiful cookbook, The Cardamom Trail, by Chetna Makan. Aside from having beautiful pictures and lots of great writing, the recipes are fantastic. And tis weekend, I decided to try making the Pear and Cardamom Caramel Cake. I’ve never done an upside-down cake before, and it’s even been a while since I made anything in a springform pan! I had to buy a new one to make this recipe, as I made my delicious cheesecake for a friends’ birthday about a year ago, and left the springform at their place. I don’t know if it’s just me,…
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Lemon Cake (Vegan!)
I’m generally pretty suspicious of vegan baking – I’ve tried a few nearly-inedible vegan sweets in the past that really turned me off. But there are a lot of great bakers out there who’ve found ways to make really wonderful vegan treats, and in looking through their recipes I found that there’s a pretty consistent formula – somehow the vinegar does the trick. This lemon cake is tasty and moist, and honestly you wouldn’t know it was vegan by taste or texture. I baked this cake last week for my sister Sammi’s birthday – she and my other sister, Cassie, were doing Vegan February, so my usual go-to birthday treats,…
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Apple Cider Doughnuts
There’s a crispness in the air, the smell of woodsmoke and leaf mould fills my nose, and the trees are blazing in beautiful colours. All I want to do is bake and make comfort food, but I have a broken wrist, so most of my favourite recipes which involve rolling out dough or chopping vegetables are out of reach for the next few weeks while my bone knits back together. So here’s a recipe that I can do one-handed, and I’m sure you can too, though if you don’t have to I wouldn’t recommend it. These doughnuts are baked, so really they’re kind-of a circular muffin, but they’re very cute…
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Honey Ginger Pumpkin Pie
I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to my traditional recipes, so generally speaking, I stick to the absolute most iconic version of a pie and do it very, very well. Last year, however, we had a bit of an impromptu Thanksgiving dinner, and I couldn’t track down my own pumpkin pie recipe (which is here, on my website – how hard is that, Candace?), and I found one I’d printed from somewhere ages ago and decided to give it a whirl. How did we end up putting together a full turkey dinner on the fly? Well, you see, my friends David and Meghan got married on Thanksgiving…
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Nana Cynthia’s Crepes
My Nana Cynthia gave this recipe to my sister Sammi when she was about 10; we wanted crepes, so Sammi called up Nana and copied down the recipe from her. We were all pretty amused to see that Sammi had spelled them ‘creaps.’ To my mind, paper-thin, hot crepes with lemon juice and icing sugar are both the only way to eat crepes, and they are the best treat in the world. But this crepe is a neutral base, and you can use it for sweet or savoury fillings. This recipe simultaneously reminds me of my Nana and my sisters as well as Paris, which I’ve visited in the Springtime…
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Salted Golden Caramel Bars
Salted Golden Caramel Bars are a fabulous recipe – simple, quick, and completely irresistible once it’s done. A pan of these rarely lasts more than a day at our house; that salty, gooey, buttery deliciousness is too hard to resist. I know salted caramel is a fad from a few years ago, but it’s also a classic – one of those things that will never go out of style. The other great thing about these bars is that they’re essentially glammed-up, slightly more adult, vegetarian Rice Krispie Squares. A lot of people don’t realize that marshmallows aren’t vegetarian (they’re made with gelatin, which is made from bones), and strict vegetarians…
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Chocolate Pavlova with Fresh Fruit
Over the holidays this year, the temperatures were frigid – sometimes as cold as -31 C, but often -20 C, so we spent a lot of time indoors. As a result, my sister Cassie and my mom and I watched a lot of the Great Canadian Baking Show and the Great British Baking Show while quilting and knitting, and it inspired us to try some new things, including this Chocolate Pavlova. Though Cassie swears we’ve made a Pavlova before, I can’t remember ever trying it, so as far as I’m concerned, this was my first one. I was initially going to go with a plain vanilla Pavlova, but Cassie was…
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Bûche de Noël
Bûche de Noël is a recent Christmas dessert for us, so not really a tradition yet, and only time will tell if it becomes one. I definitely intend on making it this year for our family dinner; we tried it last year for the first time, and my sister Cassie and I were surprised at how relatively easy and quick it was. And of course, everyone liked it, which is the most important part! The year before, I’d tried making a Black Forest Cake (I’ll probably post the recipe eventually, but I’m not like, enthusiastic about it), which was a lot of faff and not that great, in the end,…
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Pina Colada Popsicles
I found this recipe online and altered it slightly; it’s super-easy and super-delicious. They really do taste like Pina Colada Popsicles, even if you leave out the rum. If you are using rum, I totally recommend Sailor Jerry’s, which is my favourite – it’s very vanilla-y and super-delicious. The only annoying part about these popsicles is waiting for the popsicles to freeze, but then, is you get impatient, they’re pretty good as slush, too. And they’re a creamy treat for vegans! How nice! Ingredients 1 can pineapple chunks, in juice 1 banana 1 can coconut milk Rum (Optional) Directions Combine ingredients in a blender, then pour into popsicle moulds. Freeze (approx. 5…
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Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie
I always associate rhubarb with Summers at my Nana and Papa’s; they’d pick a fresh stalk of rhubarb and hand it to me with a small dish of sugar to dip the end in. Nana would make what she called ‘Rubarberry,’ a sauce of strawberries, rhubarb, and sugar that she and Papa loved to have on toast. And Papa tried his hand at Rhubarb wine, along with his other wine-making experiments (his mainstay was the sweet red wine that bubbled in demijohns in his basement throughout the Autumn). Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie has always been a favourite of mine, but somehow I never did get around to making it until this Spring,…
